It was a coronation of sorts for young Michigan rockers Greta Van Fleet – which, delegated to the festival’s second stage in Wiggins Park, pulled a huge crowd away from the main arena that filled the park’s rolling hills to hear its blistering set.

And the band didn’t disappoint, showing exponential growth even since its August show in the smaller Chandelier Lobby series at Wilkes-Barre’s F.M. Kirby Center.

It blasted into its too-short, 35-minute set with “Lover Leaver Taker Believer,” showing all the Led Zeppelin similarities that have excited listeners: singer Josh Kiszka wailing Robert Plant vocals, the band’s spacey music punctuated by Jake Kiszka’s guitar riffs.

“Edge of Darkness” showed these guys are rock stars, and they know it: Josh Kiszka standing in Plant poses, with hands on hips; Jake Kiszka playing long guitar solos, then behind his head.

Bassist Sam Kiszka switching to keyboards ala Led Zep’s John Paul Jones for “Flower Power,” which with its folk-metal sound could have come directly off “Led Zeppelin III.” The band even captured Led Zep’s early ‘70s mindset, with Josh Kiszka telling the crowd before the song that it was “about love and unity – something we all need. It’s with us today.”

For all Greta Van Fleet’s growth, its set wasn’t perfect. With the crowd in its hands, it played killer version of its No. 1 Mainstream Rock hit “Highway Tune,” but raced through it instead of extending it.

But it closed strong, with the ballsy blues-rock Zeppelin of “Safari Song,” a tune crafted not only far beyond these guys’ years, but which showed promise of things to come.

Don’t be surprised if Greta Van Fleet is at The Electric Company or Tower Theatre the next time it comes to Philly.

Even the headline stage’s best act wasn’t the headliners. That title went to Halestorm, the York-based band that a few years ago was a staple of Allentown’s Crocodile Rock Cafe (it played New Year’s Eve there in 2012) and has gone on become a Grammy Award-winning, chart-topping, gold-record band.

Halestorm, too, has grown significantly – to the point where it now is a good fit for a headline stage.

The group started its set with a blazing “Love Bites (So Do I),” from 2012, with now short-haired singer Lzzy Hale screaming out the lyrics, and 2013’s “Mz Hyde,” on which Hale sounded like Pat Benatar until she went into a scream.

But nearly half its nine-song set was from its most recent disc, 2015’s “Into the Wild Life,” starting with “I Am the Fire.” That song – aggressive but also nuanced –was Halestorm’s successful formula in a nutshell.

And Hale even started the following “I Get Off,” Halestorm’s first single from 2009, a cappella, holding a long note until the band kicked in.

That is what an empowered female rock-band singer should sound like – though it was far different from other acts Sunday such as In This Moment (more about that later). But that’s not to say Hale also can’t handle the more typical guttural roar, which she did on “Freak Like Me.”

Halestorm’s set also wasn’t perfect. In a set that lasted just 65 minutes, the band spent five minutes on a drum solo, which is OK if it adds something to the set. But theirs didn’t.

The set closed with “Miss Misery.”

The acts that did headline Rock Alliance were saved, ironically, by the ways in which they diversified from typical heavy metal.

Headliner Rob Zombie played a 15-song set as the last show of his current tour, and it was as much of a spectacle as a concert, with multimedia images on a huge screen, and flashing lights. There were even flashes of flames by the third song, “Superbeast.”

The set was standard Zombie, with hits such as “House of 1,000 Corpses” and White Zombie’s “More Human Than Human” and “Thunder Kiss ’65.”

But Zombie’s three-man band created far more sound than you’d expect.

The set closed with covers of The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” and Alice Cooper’s “Schools Out” before the closing “Dragula.”

Five Finger Death Punch’s hour-long penultimate set frequently fell into the bludgeon category on songs such as “Jekyll and Hyde” and “Burn MF,” with Mastadon’s Brent Hinds on guitar and a dozen kids invited on stage.

But for as heavy as it was, most of its material, from the opening “Lift Me Up” had melody and hooks to it. “Never Enough” had echoed vocals.

But the band’s 2010 cover of Bad Company’s self-titled song was a good example of much better metal, and an acoustic “Wrong Side of Heaven” and slow, acoustic “Remember Everything” were far better.

But it was a mistake for singer Ivan Moody to bring singer Maria Brink from In This Moment on stage to help sing the set-closing “The Bleeding.” Brink’s voice was just awful, as it was for all of In This Moment’s 35-minute, six-song set.

The group’s infantile, pseudo-satanic show, with black-robed, white-faced players – with more stage smoke that any show I’ve ever seen (all the better to cover up the lack of talent) , was patently dumb. Yet without all the visual elements, the set would have been seriously difficult to get through.

But what made the set so bad was Brink’s gratingly bad, slurred and wailed vocals, which sounded far more male than female. The band Ghost does this same thing, only far better in every way.

Even worse was that the over-obvious closing song “Whore,” which, with Brink singing from a church pulpit, purported to be some sort of female empowerment anthem. In reality, In This Moment’s whole set gladly used scantily clad women for attention – nothing more than Steel Panther’s hilariously misogynistic act.

Speaking of Steel Panther, the group’s set, which opened the main stage, was surprisingly devoid of women on stage – unlike the group’s set just four days earlier with Stone Sour at Sands Bethlehem Event Center. Not even for its bring-the-Asian-girl-on-stage anthem, “Asian Hooker.”

Steel Panther’s Rock Allegiance set also was light on comedy – just eight minutes or so in a 37-minute set.

That left most of the set focused on Steel Panther’s music, which loses a bit without all the silliness, but still was decent rock. The opening “Eye of a Panther” was standard radio metal; “Party All Day” was chanty metal, and the set’s best was “Community Property,” which is a good arena rock ballad.

Mastadon was elevated to the main stage at the last moment after scheduled headliner Marilyn Manson was injured in a stage accident last week. The band acquitted itself well, playing an 11-song, 48-minute set that stood apart because it was different – progressive metal that occasionally sounded like Rush on steroids.

It wasn’t until the band’s seventh song, “Megladon,” that it resorted to growly death metal.

Playing on the second stage before Greta Van Fleet was the festival’s only unsigned band, Los Angeles rockers Joyous Wolf, who like the band they preceded, also showed a strong Led Zeppelin reference on songs such as “Sleep, Weep, Stomp” and “Mother Rebel,” although it also did a serviceable version of Soundgarden’s “Rusty Cage.”